The Insanity of the Tea Party Conspiracy Theorists

02.10.10

I assumed that the Tea Partiers were compromised of particularly active and angry Republicans and libertarians. According to this expose by Jonathan Kay at Newsweek, it’s way more than that:

A software engineer from Clearwater, Fla., told me that Washington, D.C., liberals had engineered the financial crash so they could destroy the value of the U.S. dollar, pay off America’s debts with worthless paper, and then create a new currency called the Amero that would be used in a newly created “North American Currency Union” with Canada and Mexico. I rolled my eyes at this one-off kook. But then, hours later, the conference organizers showed a movie to the meeting hall, Generation Zero, whose thesis was only slightly less bizarre: that the financial meltdown was the handiwork of superannuated flower children seeking to destroy capitalism.

They claim to want small government and lower spending yet Sarah Palin – the big speaker at the Tea Party Convention over the weekend – offers no specifics on actual cuts and favors invading Iran (sure seems like that would require way more government spending). These people live in a totally fabricated fantasy world.